The present invention relates to a method of speech recognition. Speech recognition is used in many environments, such as speech-to-text conversion and ordering and enquiry systems. In such systems it is often necessary to match speech items versus a large data base that may contain such diverse items as personal or other names. However, the search for a particular name in such data base may lead to acoustically ambivalent results or become computationally unfeasible. Now, in person-to-person dialogs, spelling of a name or other difficult word, such as a scientific or foreign term is common procedure. Usually, a person will execute such spelling on a letter-by-letter basis, either phonetically, or through using so-called standard alphabets. However, various persons may spell in a manner that has still further variations which makes consistency fully illusory. It has been recognized by the invention that for better adapting to a particular user, a machine should be able to cope with exceptions to the letter-only sequence, in particular when interspersed qualifiers in the form of full words or even descriptive phrases are used from a limited subset of the data base. In practice, these qualifiers would render the spelling more powerful.